# Webmail provider

A webmail provider is a service such as Gmail, Outlook.com, Yahoo or iCloud that hands out free mailboxes to anyone, which Spaw reports as free_provider true and domain_category webmail.

Date: 2026-09-13

A webmail provider is a service that hands out free mailboxes to anyone who asks — Gmail, Outlook.com, Yahoo Mail, iCloud Mail, GMX, Proton and thousands of smaller ones — as opposed to a company running mail for its own domain. Most consumer addresses live at one, which is why a signup form that refuses them refuses most people.

## What Spaw answers

`free_provider` reports whether the domain is on the open free-provider list, refreshed weekly, and `domain_category` answers `webmail`. Two checks are skipped on purpose for these domains: the registration age, because the provider's domain is decades old and says nothing about the person, and the `no_spf` weight, because the provider's authentication posture is known. The mailbox is still probed, and the provider's own username rules are applied before the handshake so an impossible username never spends one.

## What it does not mean

A webmail address is not a lower-quality address, and it is not disposable: those are separate lists with separate weights. It is an address whose domain says nothing about the owner, so every remaining signal comes from the username and the handshake.

Reference: https://spaw.co/glossary/webmail-provider